When is a crisis really a crisis?

Using NLP and corpus linguistic methods to reveal differences in migration discourse across Czech media

Irene Elmerot
Stockholm University

October 19, 2023
Slovko 2023
Bratislava

Background

  • Exploring Czech media discourse of refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants (RASIM) in a European migration crisis context, 2015–2023.

  • Addressing a gap in the computational analysis of large datasets of media coverage of migration in the Czech Republic. 

Research design

  • Open, transparent, and replicable study (also for other languages / regions).

  • Investigating differences in Czech mainstream vs. alternative media’s language use: 

    • Possibility to extract (via API) news documents from ≈ 4,000 media outlets
      through Newton Media Archive, including issues in 2023.
    • Corpus based on terms for voluntary vs. forced migration.

      • Presence of actors in RASIM news (2015–2016 vs. 2022–2023).
      • Dominant collocates of RASIM terms (2015–2016 vs. 2022–2023).

Methodological start

  • Use of combined methods from both Corpus Linguistics (CL) and Natural Language Processing (NLP).

  • Construction and corpus analysis: ~1 million documents (January 2015–February 2023) = 800 million tokens.

  • Labelled 156 million tokens in documents as mainstream or alternative media; these data cleaned for CL and NLP.

Graphs

  • Proportion of the “Migration in news corpus” in all the categorised news material from Newton Media Archive.

Analysis 1: Word Frequencies

  • Tracked changes in language use over time and across media types using lemma categorization of voluntary vs. forced migration terms and their monthly frequencies.

Analysis 2: Named Entity Recognition (NER)

  • Used NameTag 2 model for NER to identify key entities in RASIM discourse.

  • This NER is constructed to show geographic locations, personal names, media organisations and other institutions.

  • The graphs show alternative media during 2015 and then 2022–2023, followed by mainstream media during the same periods.

Analysis 3: Collocations

  • Conducted collocation analysis to uncover term associations’ shifts in RASIM discourse.

  • Collocation graphs here only for “migrant”, the voluntary migration term.
  • Again, first the alternative media during 2015 and then 2022–2023, followed by mainstream media.

Key Findings

  • Alternative media’s heightened use of voluntary migration terms and references to “the West” and international actors.

  • Shift in collocations of migration terms between the three periods, with a distinct focus on differences between alternative and mainstream media.

  • Emerging media discourse shift during the crisis following February 2022:

    • Increased mentions of specific geographical names (entities).
    • “Illegal” becomes a stronger collocate to “immigrant” than to “migrant”.
    • The word “quota” disappears as a prominent collocation in alternative media.

Conclusions, limitations and possibilities

  • The 2022 crisis was (is?) portrayed as a close reality, while the 2015 crisis was more elusive.

  • Insights into far-right media communication, anti-immigrant sentiments and responsible migration reporting.

  • Calls for further Czech / international migration discourse research and interdisciplinary approach:

    • Unaddressed verbal aspects (imperfective / perfective).
    • Unaddressed lexical aspects (e.g. metaphors).
    • Other methods (e.g. Cvrček's Companions) may be used.

Acknowledgements

  • Gunvor och Josef Anérs Stiftelse (application number FB22-0088).

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References

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